Having exhausted the more traditional threats to human existence (asteroids, volcanos, large boats sinking), the Hollywood disaster movie now moves on to positively esoteric cataclysms: in this case the Earth's core ceasing - for reasons just barely explained - to rotate. While international landmarks explode and surface-dwellers face terminal sunburn, a secret team of top scientists builds a burrowing machine designed to penetrate the core and set it spinning again. Best described as Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Armageddon, this is by-the-numbers movie-making, with enough excitingly staged set pieces to offset the daft plot. Aaron Eckhart - on sabbatical from the more sober likes of In the Company of Men - puts in a pleasing turn as a boffin recruited to save the planet, while the excellent Stanley Tucci is amusingly slimy as his duplicitous colleague.

Geophysicist Dr. Josh Keyes discovers that an unknown force has caused the earth's inner core to stop rotating. With the planet's magnetic field rapidly deteriorating, our atmosphere literally starts to come apart at the seams with catastrophic consequences. To resolve the crisis, Keyes, along with a team of the world's most gifted scientists, travel into the earth's core. Their mission: detonate a device that will reactivate the core.